My new phone is a pain and keeps reminding me of life before Covid

What strikes me most about the photos which my phone throws up, is the utter guilelessness on all of our faces, the absolute unknowing of what was around the corner, says Jenny Eclair

Christmas celebrations will be different for many families in 2020 (Getty/iStock)

I got a new phone the other week. To be honest I got it last month, but it took two weeks for me to pluck up enough courage to open the box. I have an absolute fear of any new technology, which is why I never update my desktop computer until I have no other choice, at which point l leave the room because the sight of a black screen reminds me too much of flatlining patients in hospital dramas and I find myself saying tiny prayers in the toilet until the reboot is complete.

According to my partner, once the old phone had “donated” its sim card (or “brain” as I like to call it) to the new phone and the sim card was safely installed (ie not dropped down a crack between the floorboards), then the two phones would automatically “talk” to each other and the download from one to the other would quickly be completed.  

Obviously, considering that I was the surgeon in charge of this delicate operation, things didn’t go according to plan and I had to resort to “manual mode”, which involved quite a lot of hitting myself on the head and crying to get the thing working.  

And it does work, but it doesn’t work in exactly the same way the old one used to. OK, for starters it doesn’t have a “tummy button”, which is a phrase possibly only iPhone users will understand, but bear with me. In the past my old phone worked by thumb recognition, you simply placed your thumb on the “tummy button” indentation at the bottom of the phone, waited for the print to be digitally scanned by a light-sensitive microchip and bingo, you were in.

Instead of the tummy button/thumb combo, this new phone works by facial recognition. To set this up, the phone requires you to stare at your screen and move your head around so that it can photograph your face and measure your skull, at this point the screen turns black and luminous green, like the opening titles to a spy thriller. I have never felt more like a member of the secret service in my life: I tilted my head this way and that until the phone was satisfied and agent Eclair was ready for business.

Only it doesn’t recognise my face. I’ve had it up and running for more than a week now and 999 times out of a 1,000 I have to insert my pin code to gain access when the facial recognition option fails yet again.

Sometimes I don’t blame it for not recognising me. I’ve got my glasses on, I’ve got my glasses off, I’ve just woken up and my face is all baggy and creased, I’m frowning, I’m smiling, I’m wearing lipstick, I’m not wearing lipstick, I’ve been jogging, I haven’t been jogging. Obviously, it won’t recognise me with a mask on, neither do my friends and neighbours, but it’s annoying when I’m trying to use it to pay for stuff in shops.  

Finding the phone a faff to open is a small irritant, I’ll get used to it, but the other stunt this new model pulls, which I find much more unsettling, is that every day it will throw up a reminder of my past on to the home screen. Usually, this is a random photograph from the olden days, or a song title that takes me back to another time and place.  

The uninvited photographs never fail to surprise me: here I am in 2016 drinking a cold lager on the Île de Ré, there I am on stage, doing Grumpy 3 wearing a yellow boiler suit with a bucket on my head, or at a friend’s 50th birthday party with my daughter. In most of these photos I am somewhere with people, sometimes lots of people. One jumped up the other day dated 25 December 2019, when all the family had gathered at my sister’s place, 11 of us crammed around a dinner table. Just 12 months ago, when my mother still had all her marbles and I was so unappreciative of my nearest and dearest that on Boxing Day I told them all to “F*** off”.

What strikes me most about these photographs is the utter guilelessness on all of our faces, the absolute unknowing of what was around the corner. No one saw Covid coming, we were all just laughing into the lens, happily breathing each other’s germs, sipping drinks from someone else’s glass, coming to the table barely bothered to dabble our hands under the tap and talking of all the things we expected to do in the coming year.

Now with light at the end of this very dark tunnel and the hope of being vaccinated quite soon, I wonder how I will feel in the future about my phone throwing up random photos taken during 2020 – will I want to be reminded of this bizarre year or would I rather forget it? Not that this bloody phone will give me any choice in the matter. Roll on 2021.